Most HDTVs ship with default settings that are meant to look good in store showrooms, but they're not ideal in your home. Thankfully, with the right tools, calibrating an HDTV to your viewing style is easy, and you can do it in less than a half-hour.

Dear Lifehacker,
I recently saw this post on CNET describing game mode on TVs, and I'm wondering what all these other settings like "movie mode," and "PC mode" do. What do these mean? Should I use them?

Retina displays look clear at any resolution—not just just the default—thanks to Apple's HiDPI mode. This feature doesn't work natively on non-Retina machines, but a little app called ResolutionTab can help you enable it so you can use lower resolutions without a loss of sharpness.

Apple has started filling the iTunes Store with higher quality, 1080p versions of movies, and despite the fact that they're nearly 1/10th the size of their Blu-Ray counterparts, Ars Technica found that the quality is almost as good. Sharpness and color reproduction were just about on par, though iTunes lost a bit of…

YouTube recently updated to include HD video playback, but only on devices with HD screens. Modder theos0o found, though, that even smaller screens benefited from HD video, so he created a modded version of YouTube for small-screened phones that enables HD playback.

The newest version of Skype lets you initiate IMs and video chat sessions with Facebook users, even if they aren't running Skype. It also includes group screen sharing, a push to talk feature, and HD video for certain webcams.

Buying a HDTV is hard enough with so many different manufactures, model numbers, and sizes, to make things a little easier we've put together a list of the most common specifications you'll find on the box and broken them down to help you decide when they matter.